IoT for Healthcare Providers: Opportunities and Challenges in the Era of Digital Transformation

On-line Presentation

Abstract

This IDC Presentation includes data from the IDC EMEA IoT Survey, 2017 and focuses on Internet-of-Things (IoT) trends and opportunities for European healthcare providers. The IDC EMEA IoT Survey, 2017 is a European landmark study of the IoT ecosystem, strategies, investment priorities, and emerging trends. The European healthcare provider sample quota consists of 80 organizations, familiar with IoT, with more than 100 employees.

The goal of the survey is to identify Internet-of-Things trends from different angles: plans for deployment, organizational impacts, influential aspects and driving priorities, budget allocation, integration with the IT infrastructure, security, cloud, analytics, sourcing, and vendor ecosystem.

The findings show that:

Driven by the need to improve both operational efficiency and patient experience, healthcare providers predominantly adopt IoT technologies to provide remote monitoring systems. Opex is a top challenge due to the maintenance cost of IoT infrastructure. Lack of knowledge and experience in IoT implementation is also holding back enterprisewide adoption.

The IoT healthcare market is highly fragmented. Tech firms (usually start-ups) specialize in the delivery of different components of the overall platform. Hence, striking powerful partnerships with defined roles and tasks becomes essential to ensure the development of an IoT ecosystem with fine-tuned technology standards.

With 83% using or planning to use analytics in IoT solutions, European healthcare providers understand the benefits of combining accumulated data with analytics and decision-support capabilities to design and implement integrated care initiatives. However, the approach to IoT data analysis is still locked into siloed "intranets of devices," seriously impeding potential innovation and growth.

To limit troubles during the implementation, security actions are predominantly adopted at the very beginning of an IoT project, when the overall design of the platform is described and the providers of the different components are chosen. End users are regarded as the main threat vector, as well as keeping up to date with the threat landscape.